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Jane Snyder (1823-1912)
}} Biography Franklin D.’s wife, Jane Snyder Richards (1823–1912), was a strong-willed young girl who declined to be baptized into the Church when her parents and all but one of her brothers and sisters were converted in Canada. But after a spiritual impression moved her to accept conversion, not even her ill health and the bitter cold of January 1840 could dissuade her from being baptized immediately. A crowd of three hundred local citizens watched in concern and mounting anger as Jane’s brother cut a hole through ice a foot thick on Lake LaPorte, Indiana, so that she could be baptized. When the crowd threatened to have her brother arrested to prevent him from submerging her in the icy water so soon after her three weeks in a sick bed, Jane told them in a loud voice, “I want to say to all you people who have come out to see me baptized, that I do it of my own free will and choice, and if you interfere with the man who has baptized me, God will interfere with you.” The most difficult of these separations occurred in 1846 as Jane was preparing to leave Nauvoo for the West at the same time that her husband was called on a mission to England. While on the pioneer trail in Iowa, Jane delivered a son, Isaac, in July 1846, but he died shortly thereafter. She was still numb from that shock when her two-year-old daughter, Wealthy, died. By this time her husband’s plural wife, Elizabeth McFate (1829-1847), lay seriously ill with tuberculosis, and Jane gave her continuous care until Elizabeth died in March 1847. During this period of severe trial, President Brigham Young told Jane: “It shall be said of you that you have come up through much tribulation.” Although she lost her first two children on the pioneer trail, Jane bore four other children who lived long lives in the Latter-day Saint community. As a member of the original Relief Society at Nauvoo, Jane S. Richards was very prominent in that organization in Utah. Besides sustaining her husband in his calling to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, she also served as first counselor to the general president of the Relief Society from 1888 to 1901 and was one of Utah’s representatives to the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., in 1891. Marriage & Family Jane married Franklin Dewey Richards (1821-1899) in 1842. During the first fifteen years of their marriage, her husband was on Church missions for a total of ten years. # Wealthy Louisa Richards (1843-1846) # Isaac Phineas Richards (1846-1846) # Franklin Snyder Richards (1849-1934) - LDS Church attorney and married to Emily Sophia Tanner (1850-1929) who was a delegate to the first National Council of Women in 1888. # Josephine Richards (1853-1933) - women's suffrage activist and counselor of LDS General Primary Presidency ## Franklin l. West - LDS Church Commissioner of Education 1935-1953. # Lorenzo Maeser Richards (1857-1883) # Charles Comstock Richards (1859-1953) ## Franklin Dewey Richards (1900-1987) - LDS Missionary and Seventy general authority. References * Jan 1980 Ensign: They Served - The Richards Family Legacy in the Church